A Villain's Eye View: Writing Queen Chrysalis · 5:57pm Jun 8th, 2020
Blog Number 80: Change of Genre Edition
Queen of Assassins is probably the darkest story I've ever written. Given what I usually write, I feel I should explain that.
N.B. Unmarked spoilers for that story from this point on. You've been warned.
Behind the Scenes: Queen of Assassins and Why You Should Kill a Changeling
I don't usually post blogs about fics I've released, because I figure most of what's worth saying is already in the thing. On this occasion, however, it's such a significant departure from my usual practice that I think a little explanation is called for.
For a start, this newest fic is rated "Teen", which is unusual in itself, but it's also rated for "violence" and "death", which (for me) most definitely is remark-worthy.
See, these are content ratings I've never or I've rarely gone for before, and which normally I avoid in any case. The "Teen" rating I rarely go for because, as much as I appreciate conflict is the lifeblood of a rich story, writing about colourful, cheerful ponies tends to bring out my more family-friendly side. That is, after all, one of the attractions: somewhere to go to where optimism and cheer are very much welcome.
On those few occasions where I venture outside of "Everyone" territory*, it's either because of some minor grim detail that doesn't really inform the whole story much - An Old Tale in a New World had some grisly references here and there but was otherwise a mild fantasy adventure story - or because a single cruel theme centres a pony narrative - the forced deathmatch in Magical Deathmatch and the revealed apocalypse in Plugged In both lean on less gritty pony elements for the rest of the time. The former has Cheese Sandwich in it, for heaven's sake.
*As of today, that territory covers 101 out of 108 fics. I don't write "Mature" at all. I don't even like reading it in ponyfic, which is odd because I'm otherwise not squeamish about, say, blood and guts.
Even outright horror, like Jailhouse Rock and Lapidify: To See and Die, tend to focus more on subtler, more psychological tension in response to a bad situation before featuring a fight scene near the finish, and said scene was never an outright gorefest. That's been my standard M.O. when writing them, at least. I largely don't want a reputation as a hard-as-nails "Edgy Edgelord", as the saying goes. There are other things in stories I value more highly, or at least try to do justice to.
Having said that, my previous notable changeling fic, Diminished, does have plenty of grisly moments, not least of which was the baked-in idea that changeling queens inherit their title by assassinating their predecessor. The thing is, we never actually see this happen as shown in the fic. The worst violence that happens "on-screen", so to speak, is that a limb is severed and then reattached by magic later. And even there, the act is symbolic. It has a bit more reason for being there than just "to depict violence". Any assassinations are spoken about, not shown.
By contrast, Queen of Assassins does show one. It's right there in the title.
And it too represents a step on my plan to shake up my M.O. a bit and branch out into other genres. After all, versatility is the watchword here.
The Changeling Predecessor: Diminished and the Road to a "Killer" Story Concept
Way back in 2013, I was writing stories almost entirely for the World-Building Alliance group contests, specifically this one.
One of my entries was the prototype for Diminished, which was a step outside my comfort zone as it involved exploring a villain's culture through the eyes of the villain themselves (changelings, yes, but not Queen Chrysalis, as it happens; I posited a different Queen).
It was a one-off deal. At first, I kept it unpublished but allowed access to the unfinished story via a password-protected link.
Then for two years, nothing much happened. I wrote virtually nothing. Certainly, I never got around to finishing it. Instead, by late 2015, I just gave up and - as per my bad habits - called it a completed story, tweaked it, and published it. Not a huge amount of fanfare greeted it, and in the meantime, it took me another year or so to get out of my funk and write more stories again.
Then, three years after its publication (a.k.a. by 2018), and well into my own personal renaissance, I was submitting fics to Equestria Daily and getting a surprising number of them accepted. So I thought I'd push my luck and look back, trying to gather all potential fics that might be worth sending their way. Noticing a gap in my 2015 set, I thought I'd try them out.
Of the two**, only Diminished qualified, and even then my pre-reader explicitly had some misgivings and questions about my (self-confessed) primitive writing style. Well, I understood what they were getting at. Early writing work, and all. I was just surprised it got through in the first place.
** 2015 was not a productive year. Both of the fics published then were actually written two years earlier.
So on November 2018, Diminished went up on Equestria Daily. Again, not much fanfare, so I promptly forgot about it.
Apparently, People Really Like Changeling World-Building
Shortly after, an unexpected twist finally kicked my brain into gear.
In February 2019, Seattle's Angels got ahold of it and - completely to my surprise - thought it worthy of review. In fact, the enthusiasm for the changeling world-building surprised me so much that I was jolted into a new thought:
Maybe this was an avenue worth exploring? After all, changelings had been pretty popular on FIMFiction, and I hadn't really delved all that deeply into the phenomenon. Might be due another round from me.
So I took on board the details in the review, and I made some notes, and considered where in the timeline I wouldn't mind pinning down changeling culture. No doubt crossed my mind: this would be set before the Season Six finale. I wasn't a huge fan of that particular two-parter, though it had some good points here and there. Yet I also wanted to co-opt the new lore introduced in Season Six, which was admittedly one of the things I had quite liked seeing (underdeveloped as it was). The hive concepts alone were ripe for exploration.
Ultimately, since it was about succession, it would be about how Chrysalis ascended to the throne. A prequel, so to speak. Of course, that meant I couldn't exactly generate any doubt as to who would win, so the more obvious focus was on the route, not the destination.
Start with the Assassination, Then Build Your Story
Anyway, succession. One of the main ideas in Diminished had been the murderous way succession worked.
That I took and made into the story, but this time I tweaked it. Instead of being the accepted method, it would be a violation of changeling law.
Why? Because then we had a ready-made conflict. I wanted to spin the story around making sense of the assassination more fully. Perhaps some sort of political upheaval? A clash of ideologies? A rivalry between factions?
(In this, I was also influenced by DannyJ's critical reviews of the second half of Season Seven, which focused a couple of times on the concept of a changeling rebellion. Sometimes, reading reviews can be useful to a writer in more ways than the obvious! 
).
Indisputably, Chrysalis was going to be a major player this time. Not just because I hadn't written about her all that much, and rather wanted to pin down my own take on her, but also because writing a story from the perspective of a villain offered a darker, less comfortable but more interesting challenge than yet another sweet Slice-of-Life piece. After all, villains are dark characters to begin with.
Good Chrysalis, Bad Chrysalis?
The challenge was this:
Chrysalis is a villain. No question.
But...
A story focusing on her should understand where she's coming from.
That's actually not too hard to grasp. So long as you keep distinct the idea of explaining something and the idea of excusing it, you're already in the right headspace to tackle something like this. It requires a certain committed "objectivity", in a sense, though I'm not sure if that's the right word for something like fiction.
It also meant no redemption arc, no attempt at moral justification, no trying to downplay her evil actions, and - oddly - no pretending she was an inscrutable alien either. She had to be a comprehensible person, not a cartoon villain. Mad as she was with her narcissism, hunger for power, and delight in ambitious cruelty, there had to be a method in her madness.
Tricky, because she is a cartoon villain, both literally and figuratively. It's a sort of balancing act: lean too far one way, the story comes across as whitewashing; lean too far the other way, and readers have no means of grasping what this walking evil is doing and why she's doing it, not from inside her perspective where it should make some kind of sense.
For honesty's sake, I can't claim that I achieved that balancing act, least of all perfectly. Authors always think the best of their children, and all that. Still, that was what I was trying to achieve with her character here.
Creating a Worthy Worthless Opponent
To make that easier, I pitted her against an antagonist who also has discernible motives, a goal, a means of carrying out that goal, a worldview, beliefs, feelings, desires, all the things a sapient being*** should have while still being someone Chrysalis could understandably oppose.
*** Yes, that's a bit of an awkward way of putting it, but the more habitual word "human" doesn't work cleanly in a fantasy context, at least I don't think so. Maybe "people" is considered neutral enough to work? I'm not sure.
Choosing names works in situations like this. It helps narrow down some themes.
So when I discovered that "Chrysalis" derives from the Greek for "gold", I used that to give her antagonist a thematic name too. Chrysalis. Gold. Silver (as in silver-tongued or quicksilver). Argent.
"Argent" also worked for me because it echoed other words, such as "agent", "ardent", and "urgent". You'd be amazed from what materials a writer can build a character.
Even a third character helped me complicate the situation further, similar to how a three-body problem can confound an otherwise predictable system. Because apart from answering an obvious question - who was the Queen before Argent took over - it provided a chance to give Chrysalis some more nuance. After all, why would she fight the current queen? Because she approved of the previous queen, who encouraged her outlook on the world. So again, choice of name helped: as "Chrysalis" is an insect's life stage, something like that would fit here. When I found "Imago", and realized "imago" also had a second meaning - an idealization of a person - that helped shape Chrysalis' character further: she was explicitly seeing the previous queen as the standard, the idol, the best changeling possible.
So three characters: Chrysalis, a changeling she hates, and a changeling she likes. Simple, right?
Maybe too simple?
So then, of course, it helps to muddy the waters a bit.
A Conflict Doesn't Have to be Black and White (There's Orange and Purple Too)
See, I'm extremely interested in depicting complicated moralities. Instead of a clear good side and a clear bad side, I think it might be more interesting to depict two sides of a conflict defined more by mundane or non-moral issues, issues of strategy, say, or guiding philosophy, or general outlook. Then mix in the good and the bad. Basically write the thing as if you could switch perspective and still tell a compelling story.
That's not easy to do in a world like Equestria, where villains are usually either pure evil or redeemable, but Queen of Assassins already gave me something of an advantage. Since the protagonist is a recognized villain from the get-go, there's actually a lot more freedom to give her shades of grey - especially since the show rarely if ever delves that deeply into her psychology - and to create an antagonist who specifically counters her points, and who can be tailor-made to add shades of a different kind of grey. Hence why Chrysalis' zealous but understandable loyalty contrasts with Argent's wiser but more openly pragmatic and ruthless approach.
And of course, making it dark meant I didn't have to worry about including violence and death to raise the stakes while still feeling like I wasn't straying too far from the show (in some sense). They're villains, after all. Get creative! Go nuts!
Writing as a Whole: Personal Renaissance v2.0?
Man, there was a lot going on with this fic, and I think it might get a bit boring to go over them in detail here. I haven't even mentioned the "Thriller" genre influence - though it boils down to wanting to keep things fast-paced and trying something new - or the worldbuilding I created as I went.
You notice I mentioned the Seattle's Angels review as being posted February 2019? Well... I actually started this over a year ago. Then I got stuck halfway, struggled to get back into it, and abandoned it in the vague hope I'd come back later.
Well, "later" turned out to be a year later. Um... better late than never, though, right?
Good news, though: it does at least prove I can go back and finish languishing projects even after a significant gap. Which is nice, because I got a ton of these things by now.
Anyway, all this has given me more food for thought! Now I've got some of my writing motivation back up to speed, maybe this will be the first in a long line of revivals?
Well, ish. While I don't want to raise hopes too high - I'm mostly talking about unpublished works here, not incomplete fics already out there - it's definitely given me pause (and not a little enthusiasm either! Woohoo! 
).
So yeah, I hope you like or at least sort of get this step in a new direction. I wanted to test my limits, at least a little. Try and set foot on terrain. Expand my "empire" a bit.
It doesn't mean I won't write Slice-of-Life or Drama or other things I've done more often. It's just looking outside my usual territory more than I usually do. Trying to make a habit out of it. And with any luck, more experiments will come forth and add a bit of diversity to my repertoire.
If by some miracle you've gotten this far, then: Thank you for reading. It's been fun talking about this stuff. I just hope my recent revival of interest lasts a good while yet, because this has genuinely been fun.
Until next time! Impossible Numbers, out.
Also: darn, there's a lot of changeling/Chrysalis groups.
For a species-neutral, one-word term, "sophont" has been used.
I’d agree that ‘people’ can be used outside of a human context, albeit carefully.
That’s an awesome story description, by the way
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Well, I'm definitely impressed by the level of t thought that went into this.
Especially the changeling civil war and the concept of an understandable but still repulsive main villain, since a story I have is about to roll on the cusp of that as a backstory.
I'll definitely keep track of this, for sure.
5280672
Odd... I've never heard that word before, and neither my home dictionary nor Dictionary.com recognize it either. Is it a new word, perhaps?
5280932
I generally default to "people" or some version of "sapient", but I wondered if there was an agreed-upon term in fantasy or sci-fi. Also, thank you!
5280934
I'm kind of curious how often the "changeling civil war" idea has been used. It seems like something that could be very popular, but I can't think of any examples off the top of my head. A single rogue changeling rebelling, yes, but that's a whole different scale.
It's definitely a fun change of pace: there's nothing quite like getting into the mindset of a villain protagonist, because it provides so much writerly freedom. And I think an important role for fiction is to show people and experiences we might otherwise take for granted in a new light.
Thanks again for the comments. I had rather hoped to gain more attention than has been shown so far, but what I've had has been very good.
5281164
Yes, "sophont" is relatively new and has mostly appeared in sci-fi works. According to this database of sci-fi terms, 1967 is the oldest verified use.